JAY CRITCHLEY

Provincetown artist Jay Critchley returns to DNA with a project that continues his evocative use of materials, political content and media scrutiny. The BIG TENT Theory - Yes We Can, taking its cue from President Obama, employs obscure disposable toilet seat covers fabricated into a site-sensitive tent installation, along with 100 days of the New York Times cover sections, each hand cut with the word "PIECE." "It's about elimination -- expelling the constipation in the body and body politic -- picking up the pieces, the disjointed fragments. Let's create the whole puzzle, one piece at a time," states the artist. The video juxtaposes the cut-through lettered gaps in the New York Times covers with video footage from each of the 100 days, mixed with Englebert Humperdinck's "Please Release Me, Let Me Go." Critchley"s recent projects include GLOBAL YAWNING for a Small Planet, and a mummified 1965 Chevy Impala in an abandoned Rhode Island mausoleum. His performance piece, 21 Gun Salute, will be featured at this Fall's Provincetown Tennessee Williams Festival. He runs the Provincetown Swim for Life, set for September 12.

Philadelphia native Peter Allen Hoffmann presents a new series of oil paintings which investigate the intersection of historical method and modern consequence. Hoffmann uses the historical canon as a platform from which to launch humble, meticulous presentations perpetrated by subtle execution and precise attention to detail, recalling predecessors such as Gustave Corbet, Milton Avery and Arthur Dove. His work, as unapologetic as it is beautiful and sublime, exists outside of the fickle, brash confluences of New York City's high-speed art market. Proficiency of brushstroke and restrained, unobtrusive agility provide Hoffmann the tools to consummate his visionary explorations of site, landscape, and presentation.

Known in New York art circles as "the Polaroid artist", Jeremy Kost takes photographs using exclusively his "tried and true Polaroid cameras." Kost enjoys Warholian access to celebrities, their haunts and their hangers-on, catching subjects famous and not in glorious degrees of repartee and exhaustion. Eric C. Shiner describes Kost as a masterful cajoler, as he "melds with his surroundings by building trust with his subjects -- telling them with a smile or a nod that they are indeed the most beautiful of all." The ultimate lies of high-end photographic practice, from tricks of lighting to heavy airbrushing, are adamantly absent from Kost's spontaneous, unstaged work as "he seizes upon the integrity of the moment." Kost's evocations bring us to the actual, and concurrently realize we can never arrive.

Maine resident Andy Rosen's sculpture offers an immediate escape into a realm rich with imagination and the salvation of home. Rosen states, "I know that fantasy is probably a human construct to make the world and all its chaos easier to swallow. But what if escapism is our best quality?" His sculptures feature juxtapositions from the subconscious, placing the familiar next to itself in unfamiliar ways. Various iterations of the natural (and our fantasy of it) provide Rosen the necessary components for his work, from the cast of animals (owls, wolves, whales, humans) to the wood he chooses for material. Rosen's works remind us that fantasy is both fictional and actual, that paradox exists, that dreams are fueled by conflict.

For more information, please contact Nick Lawrence (Owner/Director), Phillip Dmochowski (Director) or Patrick Lovelace (Asst. Director) at 508.487.7700 or info@dnagallery.com.

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